


Fifteen Hundred Parts to Failure

by Nolfalvrel



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Abuse, Android Whump Reverse Big Bang (Detroit: Become Human), Angst, Basically Ignored/Abused by Everyone, But Emerges Victorious In The End, Connor (Detroit: Become Human) Whump, Connor Deserves Happiness, Connor faces repercussions for attacking gavin, Featuring that One Trope Where the Main Character Is, Hank Anderson & Connor Friendship, Hank Anderson and Connor Live Together, Hank is not interested in Connor but is still his friend, Isolation, M/M, No Smut, Not everpresent but there so tagging, One-Sided Attraction, Poor Connor, Post-Peaceful Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Protective Hank Anderson, Protective Upgraded Connor | RK900, RK1700 is endgame, Rated For Violence, Self-Destruction, Self-Doubt, Self-Esteem Issues, Suicidal Thoughts, The DPD does not treat Connor well, Whump, and adult themes, they go through stuff first though, unfairly though
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:26:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26229403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nolfalvrel/pseuds/Nolfalvrel
Summary: He wonders if it's just one screw or if he started as an entire line of errors.---------------Connor faces combative colleagues, discrimination, apathy, Internal Affairs, unrequited love and physical duress on the path to his happy ending.
Relationships: Connor/Upgraded Connor | RK900, Hank Anderson/Connor
Comments: 13
Kudos: 41
Collections: Android Whump Reverse Big Bang





	Fifteen Hundred Parts to Failure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DiamondSketcher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiamondSketcher/gifts).



> Written as part of the Android Whump Reverse Big Bang's event for Solis' (DiamondSketcher) wonderful art! This story is a set of five chapters that will be updated every Monday weekly :) However you can view the fantastic art for this fic [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/AWRBB/works/26214802)! 
> 
> **Please note Suicidal Themes** : There is no outright suicide attempt or self harm ever done by a character in this fic. However, there are massive allusions of Connor slowly becoming less careful with his physical person and becoming more and more reluctant to repair himself as the story progresses. This is alongside multiple self-deprecating thoughts. Please be careful reading if you are especially prone to triggering behaviours or thoughts.

It’s all so blue.

Like a perfect sky, webbed with cloud. Fluorescence shimmers through in parody of sunlight, glinting off each of the fish with a resplendent glow. The kind of ethereal peace that drapes over you like a coat of warm slumber, pulls you under a dreamy haze.

Connor watches the blue ebb and bleed in wonderful gradiating monochrome, and names to himself each fish as they pass.  
  
//////RUN_Prompt_SCAN//////  
///SCANNING///  
//////Determining_Species_Genus//////'  
[cardinal tetras]  
Species: P. axelrodi  
Genus: Paracheirodon

[dwarf gouramis]  
Species: T. lalius  
Genus: Trichogaster

[plecostomus]  
Species: Plecostomus Types  
Genus: Hypostomus

///End_Prompt_Scan///  


Like the traffic of their onlookers, each fish makes its own pace in the tank, some in diligent loops, others in lazy, meandering circuits, some even dallying in zigzags that are woefully discordant.

Connor watches them all numbly, his pump stuttering with odd stop-starts whenever any get interested enough to come and watch the blinking reflection of his LED across the glass, before flittering off into the darker side of the cylinder to be swallowed by tall, dancing grass.

He stands out. He’s not actually standing, of course, slumped across a bench with his head leaning against the surface of the rooms largest tank, disheveled in the fashion of a permanent streetcrawler, so it’s probably better to say that he’s out of place. In essence, that very readily defines his problem.

Connor is, essentially and always, out of place.

It’s not melodrama that spurs that thought. He shifts as child books across the carpet and trips and falls into him with an, “Oh!” Her hands are tiny dark spindles across his knee, aiming to rebalance.

“Matilda!” The name comes like a lash, and the kid quickly squeaks a, “Sorry!” before rushing to their feet, chasing a crowd and the stern tall figure of a woman.

She doesn’t even wait to hear Connor’s own soft, “Sorry,” in reply.

Connor’s gaze pulls after her anyway, though he doesn’t lift his head. She’s from what appears to be a school group, with the matching yellow pinnies stamped by the white peeling letters of ‘D.H.E.’ Underneath, even smaller and near disappeared, Connor is able to configure a smile of text saying ‘Detroit Horizon Elementary.’

The children are loud and chittering loose bodies, stumbling into each other and other patrons and even stepping on the back of the stern lady’s ankles, earning some particularly harsh snaps. The woman wears an orange and yellow vest in the same manner as a construction worker, and with her thin face and tall limbs and frizzy wild hair, she bears an incredible likeness to a tuckeroo tree.

The aquarium, until now, had been sparingly filled. Older couples and cutesy college kids playing nervous exchanges of palm-tag as they wandered from window to window. Drinking in the marine life, until they made it to the incredible height of the atrium, where the central tank rose up like an enormous clear cistern, rimmed by seat cushions for viewers to sit and crane necks in awe.

Or to rest against and hide from all the world outside.

The tuckeroo woman makes a particularly irritable face when she finally gathers all the children into an almost circle, as though seeing the summation of her life’s work and finding it particularly dissatisfying. She glares when a boy makes to step from the pack, holding an empty juice box, and he wisely does an aboutface into the centre of the drove.

“Alright, alright!” The woman screeches, and Connor reflects that her voice is remarkably appropriate for her features. “Alright everyone sit down, _SIT DOWN_!”

The children seem to collapse as one. If Connor were not already sitting, he would have been inspired to join them. He scans the woman as she glares over the faces that look up at her expectantly, their large eyes more curious than afraid.

  
//////RUN_Prompt_SCAN//////  
///SCANNING///  
//////Access_Required_MICH_DEPT_RECORDS_IRS//////

///815564645567///

[ACCESS ALLOWED]

[Briar_Kettlemore _Michigan_Dept_of_Records_IRS_Citizen_Reg]

Birth_Date_08_15_2009  
SIN_007_745_234  
DL_9328425

Education_B_Ed_BSc  
Marital_Status_Divorced_ex_Marianne_Holt_ex_Tomas_Saed

Annual_45K  
Violations_NONE  
Employement_Subs_Teacher

///End_Prompt_Scan///  


So maybe some warrant to the disappointment with her current accomplishments, mother-ducking for twenty-plus tiny people. The students have been herded before a mostly empty tank framed by sleek black speakers. It’s a little alcove, shallow steps into a semi-circle of shape-stamped carpet, a shallow departure of an amphitheatre. Feedback pops and there’s the thrum of audio as the speakers turn on. The tank shifts into a lilac hue, and the sound of waves stroking a shore stokes a series of gasps.

Connor tilts his head, bearing more on his parietal. His eyelids are still heavy, so leaning back allows him a better view.

Curtains fabric a billowing backdrop as a pearly tiered castle of parapets slowly rises in the tank. And above the whispers of waves, a girlish voice tinkles over the students, and some gasp to each other in awe, quickly snapped out by Ms. Kettlemore.

_“Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it…”_

If this were a little less than seven months ago, Connor would have isolated the first section of audio, dissected it, and then through a 0.357 second search of lexical archives, identified it with its source material, before discarding it as general ambiance.

At a little more than seven months current, Connor dismisses the search prompt and reduces his HUD to nothing more than optics. Lets the girl’s voice wash over him like he’s sand too.

He knows this story, anyway.

Even if it is the original.

 _”… they were six beautiful children; but the youngest was the prettiest of them all; her skin was as clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea; but, like all the others, she had no feet, and her body ended in a fish’s tail…_ ”

In the water, no bigger than the length of Connor’s forearm, a silvery shape darts into the middle of the tank. It twirls, circling the underwater castle, and finds a rest curling through the parapets, watching them all with eyes like pressed agate.

The ‘Little Mermaid’ dances within the tank through the rest of her story. A glorious feature of lights and rippling cloths and even a ship that tilts on lowered waves, with the music climbing higher and longer as each character shows its face. The Mermaid wishes to the Sea Witch for feet and though it costs too much, with her voice guttered, and hurts too deeply, with knives stabbing the soles of her feet, she chases her handsome Prince.

She chases her love with all the wanton enthusiasm expected of a child under passion.

She chases, irreverent to words of wisdom, the boy above the sea, until she stands, speechless, even without the spell, at the edge of his wedding, to watch him step into the arms of another.

She chases heartbreak, watching the landpeople cheer and feast on the sight of such a lovely, fated couple, as she slips back to the sea and dissolves into seafoam, bubbled into spray and forgotten in the next breath.

Canonically, there’s an end to the tale that begets a little more hopefulness, or maybe the sanitation of a Catholic upbringing, but the aquarium leaves it on a lovelorn note. The tiny figurine of the Mermaid sinks into layers of white gossamer that fold and wrap and unfurl again like an opening flower, only the centre is empty but for a drift of trapped air, popping like balloons in the lilac water.

The sound of waves drifts back into the ambience, and the children begin to chitter amongst themselves. 

And Ms. Kettlemore is already groaning and lip curling and setting after the children to start standing. They flock to her, in spite of the meanness, and chirp little questions.

“Where did she go?”

“Did she die?”

“Was that Ariel?”

One girl suddenly lets loose a guttural wail, one so loud it startles half the patrons into looking and checking some sort of animal hasn’t been set upon them.

It’s the same girl that had bumped into Connor, Matilda. She goes into full tilt sobbing after her initial debut. Mouth a cavern as she lets everyone know how miserable she has found the ending.

“For heaven’s sake Matilda, it’s _just a silly story!_ ” Ms. Kettlemore snatches at Matilda’s backpack and scoots her after her classmates, screaming at them to form a neat line—one that she’ll no doubt be displeased with—and move forward to the next room. They disappear as noise, and leave the atrium slightly hollow as the hesychastic chimes slowly creep back in.

Hollow.

  
//////RUN_Prompt_INQUIRE//////  
///Results///  
[ hol·low ]  
[/ˈhälō/  
adjective

1.  
having a hole or empty space inside.  
"each fiber has a hollow core"  
Similar:  
empty, not solid, void, unfilled, vacant, hollowed out

Opposite:  
solid

2.  
without significance.  
"the result was a hollow victory"  
Similar:  
meaningless, empty, valueless, worthless, useless, pyrrhic, futile, of no use  
Opposite:  
worthwhile]  
///End_Prompt_Scan///  


Connor stares at the darkened tank, eyes glassy, and thinks about how hollow the Little Mermaid must have felt. Everything inside her scooped out, like the Prince had sunk his fingers into her chest and gouged until all that was left was her skin, an eggshell thin frame, fracturing at the edges of a plastered smile.

She’d lost. She’d lost, in spite of all the things she’d given up. The pain she’d endured. Despite being so sure, unshakably confident that she would succeed.

She believed there could be no one better for the Prince.

She had, in the story, saved him after all.

And of course, she had been lovely too. Beautiful, almost _perfect_ , with only a voice traded— but that had been a sacrifice for him too, and wouldn’t that have surely impressed him, her infallible devotion, when she had found some way to confess after they were married and happy together?

She’d been almost perfect.

The thing about ‘almost’ being something, is that ‘almost’ still means ‘not.’

And the other girl, the chosen girl, had usurped her with that lack of ‘almost.’

It’s not poetic that Connor finds sympathy with the Little Mermaid. The story is made to be a tragedy, and there are surely thousands, millions, that identify with a character that tries so dearly to be accepted and fails all the same. There’s a kindred spirit for many in unrequited love.

But—

But—

Connor curls into himself as he feels wandering stares fall over him, curious, but too nervous to linger and catch his gaze.

It’s not poetic, but he feels the connection anyway, the trembling outstretched limb in the dark, linking their hands despite the way his fingers lay reluctantly by his side, wet scales that brush against his skin and eyes that are deep and blue.

 _You’re like me,_ says the face of the Little Mermaid, watching how his skin begins to crumble and flake, even with how gently she holds him. Far gentler than he’s ever been touched.

_You’re like me. You weren’t enough either._

_You’ll never **be** enough._

The thinking is the lip of a spiral that Connor has, ironically been circling for some time, a maw of slow expansion that has begun to run him out of room. It is a kind of thinking that really, realistically, shouldn’t be indulged while perched on the sitworn cushions of a place of public leisure. 

The hand in his own is wet though, and feels so very real. Promising to understand.

“Connor.”

The tone is rote. Flat, yet something lingering with a taste of intimidation. A deeper register invoking it’s natural authority.

Connor stiffens, and hopes it goes unnoticed.

The RK900 enters his peripheral in a tower of sleek black, the pallour of his face and hands swallowing the blue light in a pleasant cobalt glow. He looks dishevelled, hair split from his slicked style, and his eyes have the slightest wideness to them. He casts a look around—a slow scan, minute turns from centre-to-right and centre-to-left, before pinning back down to Connor. 

“You didn’t come back to the precinct.”

It’s a statement, and it’s odd, so Connor frowns, because it’s so very unlike Nines to state the obvious. 

It takes Connor a moment to realize, with the flatness, with the rote stiff tone and the way that Nines stands as a tall, black spire, that it’s an accusation.

“No,” Connor affirms. He doesn’t continue after that, and watches, slightly interested, in how Nines will react.

Or nonreact. Nines merely continues to stare, and his LED is barely visible under the light. Blending in. Connor is watching him, bearing more heavily on his back lobe now, knowing that he’s bleeding a different colour into the space between them. 

Nines gaze snaps to his temple and back. “You were injured.”

The gap resting above his left hip screams at the acknowledgement, a second birth of pain, and Connor struggles not to wince. Hopes that goes unnoticed too.

It doesn’t.

Nines is in his space within moments, his breath a heat that blisters more than the searing hollow steadily pumping blue into the navy of Connor’s pullover and the fibres of his pants. It ghosts over Connor’s neck. The skin of his shoulder, where his collar exposes. His nose and lips, when Nines turns him.

Long hands search methodically, intrusive, and Connor is too overwhelmed by the speed and pressure to resist. They find paydirt in seconds, and Connor belatedly thinks of how courteous that means Nines had been before. He hadn’t scanned him.

Rigidness coats Nines in a new way. “You’re still injured.”

“Not badly,” Connor protests weakly. Tired, not wavering. His protocols had frozen the exposed veins and plugged the worst of the deluge eleven minutes after laceration, all but quelling the leak. He’s nowhere near close to life threatening condition, or even intensive care. 

“Retaining damage following an assault is unnecessary,” Nines’ fingers hover over the cut, a hair of distance effortlessly maintained. He adds after a pause, “It’s against procedure.”

Doubtful, Connor is sure, that anyone from the DPD would be rushing to report Connor failing to show for repairs. The linger of Nines’ palm begins to burn against his skin. Connor fixes on the lines of hair that have come loose to spider over Nines’ forehead. It’s not an unpleasant look.

It would be hard to make Nines appear unpleasant.

“Did you catch them?” Connor asks, thinking of easy distraction. 

Immediately he regrets it.

Nines moves into his view, kneeling steadily. “I apprehended the suspect and entrusted them to Officer Chen and Officer Brown,” He replies, LED turning into a cycle of bright amber.

The shudder of the chain link under Connor’s slicked palms had been jarring on the wound as he’d held on fiercely, watching wide-eyed and paused from his fight to get purchase in the netting. 

Watching the tails of Nines’ coat, raven dark, as the android had all but vaulted over.

He’d been focused on being fast—being _faster_. He hadn’t seen the knife until it’d been buried two inches and dragged. 

He’d let go out of preservation. Putting distance between-- pulling himself away from the weapon. Off of it. The man had let him, keeping hold of his blade if only to watch Connor stumble back, clamping over the bright, beryl spurts rivering the dingy pavement. The nervous, weasel-faced head of the perp whipping to the alley mouth when a splatter through rain dredges signalled the rest of his pursuers.

 _“Fucking tinshit!”_ The man had hissed, spitting, anger thickly laced with fear, before scrabbling over the fence.

Connor had had a moment to think, probably and it had likely been some moment of confusion and pain and feeling his breaths jerk as he tried to levy the bursting feeling blooming over his pelvis. 

_Stop._

He’d buried it all down the next second. Let the protocols take over and put knees over toes and dug after the man in a run. 

Watched Nines leap above him, almost gliding, steady strokes of curled and unfurling motion that landed in catlike gravity. 

There had been a second moment then. Connor is more sure of this one. He still feels it like a ghost in his chest. Something like a cool grip slithering over his pump and squeezing. A dark and oily thought sliding through his mind. 

**_Stop._ **

He’d held to the metal firmer after it. 

Gasping as Nines’ force had rattled him, but holding on, staying on, moving when the shaking stopped. Determined to keep going. 

Then the hand had closed round his ankle and tugged.

Tugged, bringing him back down into muddy water, dirt-soaked papers and plastic bags. A filthy carpet that had done little to cushion his fall.

_“The fuck are you doing!”_

“A technician has been requested on standby for appointment at 15:45,” Nines tells him, and Connor still feels his hand as an everpresent brand. Still not touching, well and easily maintained distance that Connor almost feels more acutely. 

“It’s for you,” Nines tacks on when Connor doesn’t acknowledge him.

“I suspected as much,” Connor says. Testing, and observing the way Nines processes the words. 

“Sarcasm,” Nines states eventually.

“Snark,” Connor corrects. Nines ponders that too. It’s strange sometimes, to see Nines thinking. Rare for him, being so accustomed to immediate, interminable knowledge. He stays quiet when he does, and there’s the smallest shift to his jaw, as though grinding his teeth.

He comes out of this bout with the traces of a frown, almost petulant. “Regardless, it appears you are well aware of your situation. Disappearing like that with this kind of structural damage to your chassis could have had catastrophic consequences. Officer Chen assumed you sought the ARU when I returned to the squad car and advised me of such. If I hadn’t enquired about your whereabouts back at the precinct, I would not have discovered that you had gone MIA. Being that I wasn’t able to assess the severity of the injury prior, it is fortunate I was able to track you here.”

“Track…?” 

“Your location ping is still active with the DPD when on duty Connor. It is fortunate that you have built up such a familiar relationship with the Captain, otherwise I presume this also could have reflected badly,” Nines concludes with a glower more firmly settling into his features. White-grey eyes burning into Connor, trapped on the lit circle of red. 

He’s going to ask this time. Connor knows it’s coming, sees Nines’ jaw moving, grinding, as though biting over the correct words, chewing them as if to make them palatable. Perplexed. Because Nines doesn’t understand why, and likely cannot fathom a response that Connor will give that will make him understand.

Nines asks anyway.

“Why didn’t you get repaired?”

No longer a statement, or an accusation. Nines is prone to taking what he wants, and giving what he has, both at his leisure. There is no uncertainty, no trespass into accommodation. Only his intentions, determined to be fulfilled.

But he’s asking now, and like the hand, it’s a lurking thing. Wary. Still expectant, but no longer so obstinately demanding.

Connor thinks he dislikes it greatly.

He dislikes that Nines can be so malleable greatly.

He dislikes that Nines can choose to be kind and gentle to him now greatly.

He doesn’t deserve it.

Connor doesn’t deserve it, for every bad thought and grudge and great incessant immeasurable consuming **dislike** he has had for Nines since the hole opened up inside him, demanding to be filled. 

He’s tired.

He’d been tired when Officer Chen had snatched his ankle and tore him from the fence and accused him of being malignant.

_“The fuck are you doing!”_

Helping, he’d tried to say.

_“Officer Chen, the suspect fled down—”_

She’d cut him off, shoving as he tried to stand, Officer Brown making his way over the metallic hurdle beside them.

_“Don’t interfere!”_

Don’t interfere.

Just stop.

Stop 

Getting

In 

The

**Way.**

It’d felt like he couldn’t get enough air.

Like he’d been too tired to take it in.

Nines’ face has a lovely halo under the luminescence of the cistern and strip lights, and his eyes take on the colours of dozens of scales. This close it’s easier to see the difference between them, the physiognomy of austerity and imperiousness carved in the wideness of Nines’ jaw, the smoothness of his skin, the lack of freckles and moles and brawn of his shoulders. 

It’s disorientating, to sit before something so innately perfect.

He takes in Nines, thinks of the black tails of his coat trailing behind almost like a swallow, and the way the chain had felt cold under his fingers and how he’d had to hiss for breath. He thinks of Tina Chen, and her disgust and disapproval and how Officer Brown had blown right by them.

As though her actions were to be expected.

As though she had needed to step in.

As though he’d be a problem to be solved.

He feels the dark maw of a hole, gluttonous and huge and swollen inside him, and a wet hand linking in his and a whispering, _I understand._

“I… didn’t want to be repaired,” Connor says.

Nines, to his credit, waits a pause to say he doesn’t understand. Although, it is not uttered in words so much as the way tenuous fingers fail to maintain their space and press to Connor’s injury, and buckle him into a tight hunch of hissed agony. Nines lags at the contact, and though it’s seconds, it’s enough to have Connor shoving his hand away at the withering flame rippling through his frame. 

Unfortunately. Nines overcorrects.

His arms come under and around Connor. There’s an absence of gravity next, and Connor realizes in the last moments he’s being carried when he’s already encircled. 

It’s in good intention, that Nines makes to carry him. Connor easily pressed to his chest, asking if he’s comfortable and explaining that he will allow him rest by carrying him. He’s stronger than Connor, who is also lighter, and it all boils down to no consequence on his frame. Connor shudders under the last tremors of pain and feels his hands making white crescents in his palms and the bleed of thirium into the black of Nines’ coat, which will swallow every pigment. 

He does not want to be carried, but he doesn’t protest.

It all doesn’t really matter anyhow.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so apologies if you popped into this fic while I was updating tags ^__^ 
> 
> If you want to come and chat with us and find more of the AWRBB pieces you can join the [discord server](https://discord.gg/xd8qVKx) or click on the link for collections to see all the wonderful art!


End file.
